Just for fun... lessons to be learnt from AI War
Elemental Forums
hello,
I've recently started playing AI War, and thought it might be fun to brainstorm some ideas. And I would be very interested it Frogboy's thoughts on the game, if he's played it. I doubt any of it would be suitable for vanilla-Elemental, but for a game changing expansion, or huge mod, it has the potential to be amazing.
If you haven't played it, the key feature of AI War is that it is asymmetric. Like, really asymmetric. As in, the AI isn't even playing the same game as you. And by using that as a starting point, the AI can then be given loads of bonuses and "unfair" stuff, and it never feels like it's cheating, because the whole game is designed around that principle. For example, the AI periodically sends waves of ships against some of your planets. And while it gets these ships for free, it doesn't feel cheesey, because the size of the wave is tied to the AI Progress Meter, which is influenced by player actions... the more planets you take, the more "annoyed" the AI gets, so the harder it hits back.
I see two main benefits of this design principle:
1) you don't really get a snowballing effect. In Elemental, and Civ, and most strategy games, both turn-based and real-time, there's usually a point where you know you're probably going to win, as you're far stronger than the other players. This doesn't happen so much in AI War, as even if the AI is down to its last two stars, it can still warp in huge waves of ships to attack you (the game's lore suggests that the bulk of the AI's forces are in an other galaxy completely, which is why it can warp in huge fleets)
2) The AI doesn't need to be programmed to play the same game as the human opponent. So it doesn't need to know about research, economics, etc. This is not to say the the AI is weak. This means that the developers have been able to concentrate on teaching the AI other things, like clever raiding tactics, etc. I'm fairly new to the game, and so keep getting caught out by the AI.
So, here's an example on how some of these ideas could be implanted in an Ele-expansion/spinoff game/total conversion mod:
How about having a sov who relies nearly 100% on death magic. As such, she has no need for farms, research, gold etc. Why would she? She's happily immortal in her cursed wizards tower/castle/whatever. However, as the (human) player goes about doing his usual thing, people will die. And every time somebody dies, the power of death magic increases, giving the necromancer more power. And there could be a mechanic where the dead slowly start walking and try to make their way to the cursed tower. This will all happen passively as the game plays out, so the Ai will get more powerful just by sitting there.
Then maybe, once the witchqueen (or whatever we're calling him/her) has a large enough army of zombies, skeletons, etc, she can send them off to raid nearby cities.
Another scenario could involve a Lord of the Rings like evil superpower, who can summon huge armies from "off the map."
I'm sure you lot can come up with better ideas. But interesting huh? Maybe once the game settles down, I might look into working on a mod with some of these ideas. But it seems like a nice way of creating challenging gameplay, an interesting differences in the gameplay mechanics between different races and factions.
. Nevertheless, it would be nice to see it in the non-moded game as well, at least some differences in factions aside from starting Sovereign and alignment (kingdom/empire). 
